Modern Texas Cuisine Emerges as a Delicious Phenomenon

Creative chefs are using Texas ingredients in new ways, transforming the Dallas dining scene

Something terribly exciting is happening on the Dallas dining scene: Modern Texas cuisine, a movement that’s been smoldering for three decades, has lately caught fire.

You can see it in the smoked tilefish salad with Rio Star grapefruit and avocado at CBD Provisions, the dining room at the Joule Hotel downtown. You can taste it in the pork barbecue confit with creamed cabbage and grilled pears at Stephan Pyles’ Modern Texas restaurant, Stampede 66.

Modern Texas cuisine is what happens when creative chefs with contemporary Texas sensibilities create dishes using Texas ingredients and traditional Texan cooking techniques. It might be the apricot-barbecue-glazed quail that chef Dean Fearing sends out with a wedge salad and cider-braised bacon at Fearing’s, in the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Or the puffy masa disc that chef Tim Byres fills with pit-roasted cabrito (baby goat) and finishes with green apple salsa verde and cajeta at Smoke in Oak Cliff. Modern Texas cuisine is what you find on tables at the Rustic, Texas Spice and Barter in Dallas, Whiskey Cake in Plano, and AF+B and Woodshed Smokehouse in Fort Worth.

“Modern Texas cuisine is the next evolution of the Southwestern cuisine of the ’80s,” says Pyles. “There’s a greater audience for it than there was in the ’80s for Southwestern cuisine, and there are more talented chefs. It’s been missing here for almost half a generation. I’m very excited to see that chefs have opened up to it.” And opened up they have. A remarkable number of thoughtful chefs in North Texas are embracing techniques such as smoking, wood-fire grilling, frying and pickling, employing them in new ways.

Modern Texas cuisine draws on the Mexican, Southern, cowboy cooking, Louisiana and German traditions that shaped traditional Texas cooking, but it looks at them through the prism of the farm-to-table movement and spotlights the best ingredients. Those would include game meats and birds, local beef and lamb, seafood from the Gulf of Mexico and produce such as okra, corn, field peas, chiles, local peaches and grapefruit — anything that’s grown and enjoyed in Texas. French technique, ubiquitously used in Modern American cooking, underpins it.

“It’s the food we should be eating here,” Pyles says.

The movement, so vibrant and dynamic, makes Dallas-Fort Worth one of the most interesting places to eat today in the United States.

Stephan Pyles in the kitchen at Stampede 66. Pyles was a pioneer in the Modern Texas cuisine movement, whose roots date back to the Southwestern cuisine movement of the 1980s. (Lara Solt/Staff Photographer)

New demographic

“I think Texas has grown up a lot,” says Smoke’s Byres. “I think there’s a whole new dining demographic, 35- to 40-something, that has its own money.” That and a “super melting pot of foods that doesn’t just have to be chuckwagon or Southwestern, which seems to be what we had in the past.”

It comes at a moment in American culinary history when the local flavor of regional cuisine has largely disappeared from the upper echelons of dining, with the notable exceptions of New Orleans and perhaps Santa Fe, N.M. That plate of cured Japanese snapper with pickled fiddleheads and stinging nettles you enjoyed on a trip to San Francisco would be equally at home in New York, Chicago or Phoenix.

But tuck into a plate of bison flank with cremini mushrooms, red potatoes and green chile sausage at Hibiscus, or smoked duck breast with turnip and turnip greens at AF+B, and there’s only one place in the world you could be: Texas.

The evolution

The movement can be traced to the small group of Texas chefs in the mid-1980s who founded what was known as the Southwestern cuisine movement. Most were working in Dallas (Pyles, Fearing, Avner Samuel); one worked in Houston (Robert Del Grande). A cookbook author and restaurant consultant, Anne Lindsay Greer (now Anne Greer McCann and a columnist for The Dallas Morning News), brought them together.

“I think we were all dabbling in it,” says Fearing. Pyles opened his first restaurant — Routh Street Cafe — in 1983, the same year Greer published her cookbook Cuisine of the American Southwest.

By 1985, Samuel was presenting dishes with Southwestern flair, such as grilled breast of pheasant with pumpkin pasta and crisp yam, at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Fearing replaced Samuel at the Mansion in 1985, and Fearing’s brand of Southwestern cooking made generous use of chiles and game. It was in those early years that lobster tacos and tortilla soup became Mansion signatures.

“We were all from different places,” Pyles remembers. “I was the only Texan.” Routh Street Cafe served dishes such as veal chops with barbecued corn sauce and buttermilk-cayenne onion rings and smoked rabbit-black bean tostadas. Though the press and the public thought of what he was doing as Southwestern, Pyles says some 30 years later, “I thought, no — this is Texas cuisine.” He opened Baby Routh in 1986 and published a cookbook, The New Texas Cuisine, in 1993. The following year, at his new Star Canyon, his focus was more specifically Texan than broadly Southwestern..

Cowboy cooking then became fashionable, as Grady Spears debuted Reata in Alpine in 1995, then in Fort Worth in 1996. Tim Love followed with Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in 2000. Fearing continued cooking Southwestern dishes for many years at the Mansion, but the movement was losing steam.

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Southwestern fades

In 2006, when Fearing left the Mansion, to be replaced by John Tesar and the promise of New American Cuisine, Dallas Morning News writer Joyce Saenz Harris proclaimed Southwestern cuisine dead on the Dallas dining scene. “The change in menu isn’t only about recipes and ingredients,” she wrote. “It also represents a shift in Dallas’ dining identity, which was perhaps inevitable given how Dallas tastes evolve.”

When Pyles opened his namesake downtown restaurant in 2006, the flavors of Texas weren’t absent, but they melded on the plates with South American and Mediterranean tastes. Fearing opened his namesake dining room at the Ritz-Carlton the following year, Southwestern flavors mingling with Asian and Mediterranean ones. Cowboy cooking was clomping along with little creative vigor, mostly in Fort Worth.

Then in September 2009, with a couple of partners, a talented Pyles alumnus — Byres — opened Smoke in the Belmont Hotel in Oak Cliff. The idea was garden-to-table-meets-barbecue, and everything served, including vegetables, somehow involved smoke.

Byres’ dishes became progressively more creative, and by early 2012, the restaurant felt like something truly special. “The dishes Byres is creating now put him in the forefront of a new kind of Texas cooking,” I wrote in a four-star update review that February.

Chef Tim Byres and two partners opened Smoke at the Belmont Hotel in 2009, kickstarting the Modern Texas cuisine movement. He seasons goat in Smoke's kitchen. (Ron Baselice/Staff Photographer)

“All of a sudden, it just naturally elevated,” says Byres, looking back. At Smoke, he says, he was cooking with fire, with mesquite, feeling the influences of Mexico, the Gulf and Louisiana, and he asked himself, “How do you take it all and do it in a way that’s modern and exciting?” He began to draw inspiration from all the Texas tastes around him. He came up with one of his most successful dishes — smoked pork jowl with half-sour cucumber salad — after eating corned beef hash with half-sour pickles at Cindi’s Deli.

At El Ranchito, the Mexican restaurant in Oak Cliff, he found himself sitting near the women making the corn tortillas as he ate roasted cabrito. “And I said, ‘Wow, this is great. We should barbecue whole goats,’ and ‘Let’s make cajeta — that’s a goat caramel.’” Another brilliant dish — masa and pit-roasted cabrito — was born.

Since the opening of Smoke, the movement has blazed forward. Whiskey Cake opened in Plano, with a casual, modern Texan take on farm-to-table. The Omni Dallas hotel opened in late 2011, with its signature dining room, Texas Spice, spotlighting Texas tastes in a modern way.

Three months later, Tim Love opened Woodshed Smokehouse in Fort Worth, featuring a panoply of creative dishes smoked over various types of wood. Later in 2012, Pyles opened Stampede 66, turning his attention once again to Modern Texas cooking.

The Rustic followed in 2013, serving Modern Texas cuisine to the masses (it seats 1,000 diners), and Barter debuted in late 2013. Not all of it is impressive; much of it is being created by chefs who are very much still finding their way, to audiences that might be more focused on cocktails and the scene (as at Barter).

Consilient’s focus

But recently, Consilient Hospitality, the group that owns a number of restaurants on Henderson Avenue and manages the Joule Hotel, has taken the genre to a new level. Modern Texas cuisine is playing out deliciously at CBD Provisions at the Joule, at Hibiscus and at AF+B.
With a focus on carefully sourced local meats, Gulf seafood and locally grown produce, all treated in inventive ways, Consilient’s chefs, particularly Michael Sindoni (CBD Provisions) and Jeff Harris (AF+B), are creating exuberant dishes that clearly express the Modern Texas aesthetic.

Tristan Simon, founder and co-owner of Consilient Hospitality, has been important in the Modern Texas cuisine movement. Consilient owns CBD Provisions, Hibiscus, AF+B and other restaurants. (Ben Torres/Special Contributor)

At CBD, Sindoni is flavoring cultured butter with bottarga (dried, cured mullet roe) from the Gulf and serving it with raw and braised heirloom radishes and toasts. His pig’s head carnitas — a dish that takes more than five days to prepare, as the pig’s head is brined, cooked sous-vide, then roasted — has attracted attention in national publications; Tesar, the former Mansion chef, plans to feature his own version of it at Knife, his upcoming restaurant at Hotel Palomar.

In Fort Worth at AF+B, Harris, one of the few native Texan practitioners of Modern Texas cuisine, features dishes such as crispy quail with sorghum hot sauce, lamb tartare with smoked egg purée, and smoked beef short rib with stone-ground grits, fiddlehead ferns and crispy hominy.

The movement — for it’s far more significant than a trend — seems to be gathering speed. Fearing has a new cookbook, The Texas Food Biblei, which will be published this week; many of its dishes, such as pork tenderloin with watermelon-jalapeño glaze on yellow tomato pozole stew, feel very Modern Texan indeed. Byres and his partners plan to open a second Smoke, in Plano, in late 2014. And Consilient founder Tristan Simon announced in early April that Grasslands, the restaurant it plans to open in the Joule later this year, will put Modern Texas cuisine squarely in the spotlight.

Texas, mused Simon, “is very much an emerging, of-the-moment state. It’s a fast-moving, forward-looking and increasingly progressive state. The combination of that and the culinary traditions, plus the ongoing fact of Texas bravura and the desire to celebrate all things Texas — that goes a long way to explain the emergence of Texas cooking.”

Native Texans have a tendency to reserve their bravura for the traditional: barbecue, Tex-Mex, rodeo, country music, football, home cooking. Embracing the new represents more of a challenge; perhaps that’s one reason Modern Texan cooking has evolved so slowly.

But with such a great influx of migrants from around the United States and immigrants from around the world, Dallas has become one of America’s most dynamic cities. It’s a city in search of a new identity, one that addresses what it means to be Texan. As part of it, we’re yearning for something that really tastes like modern Texas.